Apache Spark for Library Developers

As a developer, data engineer, or data scientist, you’ve seen how Apache Spark is expressive enough to let you solve problems elegantly and efficient enough to let you scale out to handle more data. However, if you’re solving the same problems again and again, you probably want to capture and distribute your solutions so that you can focus on new problems and so other people can reuse and remix them: you want to develop a library that extends Spark.

You faced a learning curve when you first started using Spark, and you’ll face a different learning curve as you start to develop reusable abstractions atop Spark. In this talk, two experienced Spark library developers will give you the background and context you’ll need to turn your code into a library that you can share with the world. We’ll cover: Issues to consider when developing parallel algorithms with Spark, Designing generic, robust functions that operate on data frames and datasets, Extending data frames with user-defined functions (UDFs) and user-defined aggregates (UDAFs), Best practices around caching and broadcasting, and why these are especially important for library developers, Integrating with ML pipelines, Exposing key functionality in both Python and Scala, and How to test, build, and publish your library for the community.

We’ll back up our advice with concrete examples from real packages built atop Spark. You’ll leave this talk informed and inspired to take your Spark proficiency to the next level and develop and publish an awesome library of your own.

William Benton leads a team of data scientists and engineers at Red Hat, where he has applied analytic techniques to problems ranging from forecasting cloud infrastructure costs to designing better cycling workouts. His current focus is investigating the best ways to build and deploy intelligent applications in cloud-native environments, but he has also conducted research and development in the areas of static program analysis, managed language runtimes, logic databases, cluster configuration management, and music technology.

Erik Erlandson is a Software Engineer at Red Hat, where he investigates analytics use cases and scalable deployments for Apache Spark in the cloud. He also consults on internal data science and analytics projects. Erik is a contributor to Apache Spark and other open source projects in the Spark ecosystem, including the Spark on Kubernetes community project, Algebird and Scala.

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The Apache Software Foundation has no affiliation with and does not endorse the materials provided at this event.